I feel like the stuff I do is worth my time, but never money. Not even a little bit of money, when it's programming. Some of this is ordinary cheapskate-ness, but some is a mental block about the worthiness of what I do. So today, I paid for proper hosting. I've been doing that for a bit, but on a site that didn't allow me to put up these web apps I do, and where various stuff was unreliable, and...

Well, I'm one step closer to running out of excuses to prevent me selling stuff or submitting my blog posts (the technical ones) to aggregators like Hacker News or Digg.

As if to underscore the point, power went out in Fremont this evening, taking down my server. So my technical weblog can't be seen right now, nor my little demo of my application be downloaded.

That's what I'm putting money toward. The idea that that won't happen again, or will happen only very occasionally and very briefly rather than all the time. It'll take me a few days to get stuff moved over, but soon my stuff will be better hosted than ever before.

And that removes one of my big "I can't do this" excuses.

Next step: getting friends to look at my little application and tell me what's wrong with it. Some later step after that is to add a "you can buy this from me" page that actually accepts money... And that will definitely be a step I try to dodge around, without admitting to myself what I'm doing :-) But hey, one chunk of mental resistance at a time.

The app in question isn't Ruby. I actually have a list of people who I need to ask about it. It's just not quite there yet.

I have a list of "do this first"s. The big three -- compile on Windows, include an installer, get reliable hosting -- are nearly done. Once stuff has moved completely onto the new server, they'll all be done.